Various approaches have been taken to automatically sewing a shoe together. These approaches have concentrated on holding a series of pieces of a shoe with respect to each other while allowing an automatic sewing machine to join and sew the pieces together. This is typically accomplished within the automatic sewing machine, by a positioning system that presents the thus held pieces to a reciprocating sewing needle in accordance with a predetermined sequence of movements residing in a stitch pattern memory. Examples of methods for holding pieces of a shoe during such automatic sewing can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,988,993, 4,171,672 and 4,455,952. Each of these methods requires that all pieces of the shoe be fixedly held in precisely the same manner during the entire join and sew operation that is dictated by the stitch pattern residing in the stitch pattern memory. Such methods do not always allow for all sewing of the respective pieces to take place. Specifically, a piece of the shoe may need to be held down in an area where further stitching must take place. This is especially true when sewing multiple layers of shoe pieces together wherein certain underlying layers of the assembled shoe pieces do not uniformly support the top layer of the shoe that is to be joined thereto.